James Fox on His New Keith Richards Bio: Life

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"People say, `Why don't you give it up?' I don't think they quite understand. I'm not doing it just for the money, or for you. I'm doing it for me," says Keith Richards in his turbo-charged, long-awaited autobiography, Life, released today (Little, Brown and Company). The book covers life as a Rolling Stone, his marriage to Patti Hansen, his conflicted-albeit-creatively rich relationship with Mick Jagger, his notorious drug busts and struggles with addiction, and the genesis of rock classics like "Ruby Tuesday" and "Honky Tonk Woman."

Writer James Fox (White Mischief), who has known Richards since the early 1970s when he was working for the Sunday Times in London, says the most interesting thing he learned about the rock legend through the process of writing this book with him was "Keith's capacity for hard work—long hours of concentration and application. Not just with this book—and we often did three-hour sessions at a stretch—but when he went off to promote Exile on Main Street."

Fox continues: "Just his sheer relentless grind and cheerfulness all the while. There is nothing laid-back about that; he is still ambitious and dedicated."

"His love of animals also interested me very much," Fox says. "He once told me that when you get dogs as pups, they never forget you, even though you're separated from them by oceans for long periods."

The story of Richards' rescuing a dog from Moscow is chronicled in Life and "the enormous lengths he went to get him back to the U.S. were quite unexpected, even though he obviously has a warm and deep heart," Fox says. "Once, to my amazement, very early in the morning when I walked into the sea for a swim at Parrot Cay, I heard a splashing behind me and I turned around and saw Keith Richards swimming out accompanied by a Labrador and another dog—one on each side. Not the sight you would expect."

The best party of the book may be a handwritten note from Richards on the book's jacket that says, "Believe it or not, I haven't forgotten any of it."